ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT; Searing Messages And Imaginative Flair

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

Published: June 18, 2006

TO what extent is William Kentridge, the South African illustrator, filmmaker and theater set designer, a political artist? At first glance his printmaking, the subject of a touring survey at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, suggests something out of a Sergei Eisenstein epic: withering black and white imagery of the poor and downtrodden, satirical attacks on bourgeois society.

But since Mr. Kentridge's international art world debut in 1997, at the Documenta X survey in Kassel, Germany, he has become one of the darlings of cravat-wearing collectors, curators and art world kingpins. Now 51, he exhibits with the choosy Marian Goodman Gallery in Manhattan, and his animated films have swiftly earned a place in museum collections.

Mr. Kentridge's success rests on his frank, often disquieting dramatization of recent life in South Africa. His charcoal drawings, animated films and prints touch on not only the racial problems of the apartheid era, but also the guilty, privileged existence made possible for white South Africans under apartheid.

Drawing is the basis for everything he does, including his animated films, typically made by using an animation camera to photograph a charcoal drawing in various states of completion. What is less well known is that Mr. Kentridge began as a printmaker and has devoted himself to the medium throughout his career. The present exhibition shows 120 works, primarily in black and white, ranging from 1976 to 2004 and representing a third of his output as a printmaker.

Born in Johannesburg, where he still lives, Mr. Kentridge is a third-generation South African of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage. He comes from a family of lawyers, some of whom have been prominent in civil rights cases; Mr. Kentridge initially studied politics, but a spirit of soulful liberation nudged him into art.

The exhibition is hung chronologically, beginning with early prints from the 1970's and 1980's. They are mostly strange-looking figure studies, with heads twisted about or arms skewed to the side. They are also derivative, recalling the work of the English painter Francis Bacon. But by the mid-1980's, things began to change, with the artist's early detachment yielding to more openly political material.

If this work is political, it is so in ways that reflect more generally on the human condition. Rendered in a faux-rough style, with deliberately messy workmanship, Mr. Kentridge's prints from the mid-1980's onward mix seriousness and playfulness, searing social messages and imaginative flair. In one print, a faceless black laborer struggles with a rubbish-filled sack as a white couple dances nearby, while in another, a sequential series of prints, called ''Felix in Exile'' (1994), a man in his hotel room has intimations of other lives and deaths in the city around him. These pieces have a credibility not to be expected in any sort of social or political art, let alone that made by a prosperous white guy from the right side of the tracks.

South Africa's social and political emergencies of the last few decades have given Mr. Kentridge's peculiar creative intelligence a strong sense of focus and purpose. He excels, perhaps even delights, in depicting human suffering: states of confusion, exploitation, anger, boredom, loneliness, fear, frustration and even physical pain. His works stir an appalled empathy in the viewer.

Sometimes, however, the works can get overburdened with politics. One example is ''Art in a State of Siege'' (1988), a print depicting a stout, cigar-smoking businessman wearing a pinstriped suit, below whom Mr. Kentridge has scrawled the words ''100 Years of Easy Living.'' It is a typical work of this period, a piece of agitprop originally produced as part of a series of posters to be put up at night around Johannesburg to protest celebrations of its centenary. At the time, South Africa was in a state of emergency.

The boldly graphic and satirical qualities of Mr. Kentridge's prints recall posters and paintings by the German Expressionist artists Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and others. They also bring to mind Bertolt Brecht's left-tilted political theater, for many have stagelike settings and several have a crudely moralistic quality, depicting near-caricatures of working people striving to be happy while trapped in some futile life. There is always something weary, half-despairing about Mr. Kentridge's figures.

Perhaps the most important predecessor for Mr. Kentridge's social and political satires is William Hogarth, the 18th-century English painter and engraver. Hogarth was one of the great satirists, inventing and then popularizing narrative sequences of witty anecdotal prints pointing up moral, political or social abuses. In 1986, Mr. Kentridge produced a suite of etchings, titled ''Industry and Idleness,'' based on Hogarth's series of the same name.

Whereas Hogarth's etchings contrast the successful life of an industrious apprentice with that of an idle one, Mr. Kentridge centers on a more appropriate moral equivalent for Johannesburg in the mid-1980's. His etchings contrast the life of an industrious black man, who works hard but is doomed by his class and race, with that of a white man who ends up wealthy and successful despite idleness. The images are funny and clever, but as with much of Mr. Kentridge's art, the unsettling premise makes for hard, ultimately comfortless viewing.

Photos: COMMENTARY -- An aquatint and engraving with a hand-printed title.; HUMAN CONDITIONS -- ''Blue Head,'' an etching and aquatint, and a detail from ''Portage,'' upper left, Chine-collé figures printed on multiple spreads of a century-old Nouveau Larousse illustrated encyclopedia. Both are part of an exhibition of William Kentridge prints at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers in New Brunswick.